FACES OF GRCC

Mansehaj Singh
Age 21, Big Rapids
“My religion, Sikhism, gives me a way to express
myself, it gives me an aim in life. Whatever I do,
I try to do it through my religion because it has
shaped every aspect of my life. It’s a really easy
religion, all it tries to imply is that we should
love and remember God. Whatever we do, we
should try to do it with an honest heart and we
should care about others. If we can help someone,
we should. It says that God resides in everything,
so we should treat everything around
us with respect. I still do not consider myself
religious. I guess it depends on how you define
being religious. I don’t consider Sikhism to be a
religion, more of a philosophy to live by. I think
it’s a really open thing, all it does is encourage
you to love your surroundings, love God, serve
others, and find true happiness through that.
“The reason I don’t call myself religious, is because
it just so happens that I can connect my
whole life to Sikhism, my experiences matched
up with what I read. I could relate to it, I had
already experienced things I learned about, it
wasn’t that I learned something and then experienced
something spiritual. It’s not like Sikhism
changed who I am, it just encouraged me to
do a few things differently, and I guess I don’t
know what people define religion as. For me,
it’s sort of blind faith in something that was written
a long time ago, not that it’s a bad thing.
“I don’t even know what being religious means.
You should just be a nice person, and believe in
God and you can experience everything on a
better level. I don’t believe a specific religion to
be any better than another, and I don’t believe
the concept of being religious. I think all religions
end up talking about the same thing in
the sense that they try to attain enlightenment,
it might be through different paths, but in the
end they’re all trying to attain enlightenment.”
Reporting and photo by Priya Kaur